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Last July I made a conscious decision to stop going to conferences and start focusing on building businesses. I was tired of flying to different conferences that felt like it netted no return for me. Currently, it doesn’t help me one bit to attend a conference, let alone speak at one because my primary focus is building my company, Eventup.

I made the decision not to attend SXSW this year for this very reason, to focus on building something that delivers an amazing consumer experience, not just talking about it all. Frankly, it is so hard to find nuggets of real information at conferences anyways. When I pay attention to twitter feeds of conferences, you’ll notice it’s the same old things I’ve heard since 2002. “You need to be faster than the next company” and “description tags help click through rates in search” (hat tip to @brandonfritz for pointing that one out to me). It doesn’t help to hear the same thing twelve times, to be honest, if you need to hear it that many times before you implement it, there is a problem.

I’m not saying conferences are bad, because that would be a huge injustice to the entire industry. Furthermore, it would be like shitting on what I learned from for so many years and it would be unthankful of me because it helped build my brand in a way. And just like me, it is extremely important to those just starting who are there to hear things for the first time and I love passing my experiences on to them. I’ve never claimed to be an expert, I’ve never claimed to be the most knowledgeable – I just like sharing my experiences in the hopes that people learn from it. That’s what conferences should be for, to help educate and evangelize knowledge from those with experience to those just getting their start, trying to solve problems creatively, or to talk to others and share tips.

What I am saying is that if you’re spending year after year attending conference series after conference series, speaking 10-15 times a year, it’s time to rethink that strategy if you’re trying to build a business or a career for that matter. I’m saying that it’s time people stopped trying to spend their days and nights building a “brand” or stroking their own egos and start focusing on doing what our industry is about, innovating. Again, do what you need to, to learn, to educate, to get what you need out of it, but, at a certain point, you need to focus on winning, not just talking about it.

The primary reason I switched from a community college and majoring in Psychology, to attending a little known tech school, Mt. Sierra College, and going after a technology degree was that main reason. I wanted to be a part of the innovation. I wanted to innovate and wanted to build. Sure, I realized that I wasn’t the best technologist, I was probably sub-par at best. But I knew that I still wanted to be a part of creating something that would hopefully change the world.

Right now, we’re in a period where we’re not only innovating on industries, but innovating on our own industry. Adding a new and much needed layer to E-Commerce with the subscription commerce market that is now booming with BeachMint and new entrants into the space like WittleBee (Science backed company by my good friend Sean Percival).

But, it doesn’t end there, the industry is re-inventing itself in a way with companies like Airbnb leading the “collaborative consumption” or “shared economy” charge and turning the listings business on their heads. Watching fledging giants like Yahoo! turn to patent trolling because of a lack of innovation also leaves room for other business to take over what they once owned.

This all takes me back to my original point, talk is cheap. Steve Jobs once said that ”Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” I fully believe in that. The question is, are you going to be a leader and take part in a time of massive growth where forms of commerce are being innovated upon daily? Or, are you going to sit there and talk about marketing in 15 different ways until your blue in the face but realize that marketing is still, well, marketing.

For me, it’s a no brainer. I’ve decided that I want to spend my days and nights trying to solve real world problems, provide consumers with better experiences online, and taking a part in the innovation of an industry that I know, love, and cannot live without.

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As I start every new year, just like everyone else I come up with a few resolutions I’d like to really work on and hopefully have some progress on. I feel like it’s really important to set small goals/quick wins and build upon them, to hopefully reach and achieve larger goals. Over the past few years, I’ve made these changes and they’ve made big impacts on my life. Some impacts come in the personal forms of eating better and being more active, which had led to me losing 60 pounds over 4 years. This was huge for me because it helped me also achieve personal goals of career growth, personal branding, speaking at conferences, etc. But all of these have really helped me really understand me and who I am.

I am a very passionate and emotionally charged individual that gets massive amounts of fulfillment in what I do daily — work or play.

For the last couple years, I tried to make a point not to get involved in drama and involve myself in things that were overly negative and did not help my life in a positive way. The reason I wanted to get away from this is that it did not bring me any fulfillment. I wasn’t happier because of it, in fact, I think it made me a more angry and negative person – never a good thing. After achieving all I could at Myspace and moving on to greener pastures, I really made an effort to achieve this goal.

The first step was getting back to being more entrepreneurial and not being at big companies, because much like sitting in a box all day doing dev work, being at larger companies the likes of Yahoo! and Myspace really stressed me out. I didn’t want to spend any more time worrying about political issues or CYA, again, it brought me no fulfillment. I knew I enjoyed my work and getting things done and seeing goals hit make me happy, so I needed to be in a business that allowed that. More specifically, I needed to take a REAL challenge in running my own. I made the choice of joining Science as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) to build out a business I had helped create and increasing revenue at my online marketing consultancy, Visible Factors.

Within a month, I noticed I was already happier. I had good clients, I was working on things that mattered, and trying to solve real problems. Within a few months, I was already in the trenches of growing out a consulting business and made major progress and built a team for the business I was looking to build. By the end of the year, I have a consulting company that has 5x’ed revenue through existing clients and new projects, a startup with funding, a great product, a team of eight, and a plan to grow quickly.

I actually had lunch with a friend today and it made me realize all of this. I started to think about it while driving. We achieved so much in the short periods of time and it was out of positivity and great work ethic, the two things I’ve prided myself on. I’ve cut out the people that don’t execute and create negativity, I have learned to say “No!” (shout out to Greg Boser), and, oh ya, I’ve cut out the negativity.

This has allowed me to focus on the things that bring me great joy: family, friends, and building/growing companies. I’ve decided that this will continue to be a personal motto of mine in my life – “Focus on what is important”

I don’t have the time to deal with drama, difficult personalities, negativity, etc. and anything that brings that, I’m going to make sure I cut that out. I’m going to do this for myself, but, more importantly, for my team. I like building a culture around positivity, execution and work ethic (I’ll get into work ethic another time). Being around those that care about you in the same way that you care about others can really affect your daily well being. I’ve learned about the people I care about and choose to spend time with them. I’ve learned about the personalities I like to work with and will continue to work with those. I’ve learned a lot about myself and continue to learn a lot about what it takes to build and grow a business. I definitely don’t have the answers and I damn sure make mistakes, we all do, I am learning and adjusting daily. But again, I know I will only focus on what is important.

What are you changing this year? What are you focusing on? What is important to you?

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I saw a tweet posted by Mark Suster talking about getting your REAL MBA by working for yourself and it reminded me of where I learned so much, outside of school. I made this decision early on by going to a small tech school that no one knew about and taking a telemarketing job at a tech company, when I was 18 years old. “Hello future, I’m knocking on your door”, that’s all I could think of daily while I amassed experience and knowledge.

The truth is that I learned most of what I do on a daily basis on the job while I was going to school. No matter how much I learned in school, I was always learning an order of magnitude more by solving real world problems on a daily basis. There are no case studies you can read or tests to take that could compare to this knowledge. From integrating technology/server infrastructure to web development, and learning to manage clients to figuring out sales/revenue growth strategy. There was no classroom environment that could team me any of that, the pressure of being on the job and solving the problem is what separates the men from the boys. Having that experience at such a young age, provided me with the ability to deal with situations with much more ease as I get older.

What most people don’t realize when getting into school and wanting to become an engineer of some sort is that it’s not just about learning theory. But, it goes deeper than that, it’s not just learning the theory or the programming language. It’s about understanding the theory, the practice and dealing with real world problems that sets you apart. Dealign with real world problems allows you to gain experience of how to deal with situations, both from a programming standpoint and a person standpoint. As I start doing less and less dev work, I forget the little things that I use deal with on a daily basis. When you aren’t facing problems in the real world on a regular basis and you just learn something in school, it takes much longer to figure out the solutions because of the amount of research you have to do to figure it out.

Similarly, dealing with business issues has the same challenge. You could learn all about the 3 P’s and how to access your competition in Marketing 101. But, the fact of the matter is that if you haven’t actually done it in the real world or faced real world situations, it’s going to be much harder when you do. When I was asked to deal with all the day to day operations, while I’ve run Visible Factors, and when I managed my various sites, I learned how to deal with many things. From how to incorporate and the types of companies formed to dealing with clients and managing a budget. I learned so much daily that I stopped caring about my school work and it was more of a hobby than actual education.

My education was happening while I was working and continues on to this day running the first online event venue marketplace.

I learn so much every single day I run eventify because there are things that I haven’t dealt with before. I find myself leaning on a support system of really smart entrepreneurs and mentors when I’m in need. Which reminds me that I built that support system networking with folks in the industry, which I learned was important early on. And, those were the days after I graduated Mt. Sierra College, sitting there wondering if I should get an MIS degree or go back for an MBA. I’m glad that I didn’t because everything I learned and everything I continue to learn daily is way more important than any degree I could have gotten. If I got my MBA I never would have started my own consulting company at 22, I never would have taken contract gigs to work for startups, and I never would have gone to work at PayPal. All of those have been extremely instrumental in my career.

I’ve always been apposed to those that get their MBA, but, I know that it’s important to many, so I don’t discredit it entirely. But, what I will say is that if you come out of grad school with an MBA and a chip on your shoulder, you’ve got another thing coming. There are hundreds of people waiting to knock that chip off your shoulder, including myself. It reminds me of some of the people that I worked with at Yahoo! and why I disliked the marketing organization there so much, and, why I would never hire anyone I worked with their. (yes, at the risk of hurting some feelings and burning some bridges, even though that’s not like me at all). Now, you might ask, “why, working for Yahoo! could be great experience!?” The problem with that logic is many kids (yes, to re-iterate, “kids”) get their MBAs and work at big companies, but don’t face real world problems. They don’t know how to solve situations creatively and they don’t know how to be scrappy with costs. That isn’t a valuable resource, that’s an overpaid MBA that will never provide startups and entrepreneurs any real value.

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The other day I wrote about how it is really important to let go of people that aren’t executing. But, I thought it was important to talk a little bit more about that process. It’s really important for this to be handled delicately for many reasons, including, but most importantly, the team.

They key is that you don’t want to hurt company morale. No matter how you cut it, When letting go of people, it’s going to hurt the morale of the team (unless they flat out hated that person). If you are going through a lot of turn over, you’re going to have a team that feels beaten down. When a team starts feeling this way, you’re in trouble and it could effect the overall productivity that you get out of people. Obviously, is someone is not working out, you can’t sit on it and wait for too long, but, be careful during the process not to alienate people and provide respect to the person being let go.

Don’t let an employee become a cancer: On the opposite side of being careful by letting someone go not to hurt morale, you need to be proactive. By being proactive you mitigate the risk of someone on the team negatively impacting the morale and productivity of the team around them. Some people that don’t feel at home or don’t feel like it’s going to work out, will just start trash talking others and hurt the team’s morale. With these people, it’s important to fire fast and move on to finding the right person.

Follow up a firing by bringing the team together: Once you have let someone go, you want to rebuild the momentum of the team and get them back to feeling good. You don’t want people to think about the loss of a teammate for too long. You should be doing team building type activities, like taking the team out for a happy hour or something that is fun and out of the ordinary. Doing this will remind the team about the fact that they are a tight cohesive unit and that you are a part of that unit that wants to get stuff done.

Create Incentives: When letting someone go, you might consider creating incentives for other people on the team. Challenge people to meet certain deadlines and give them tough problems to solve. But, it doesn’t just end there, create an incentive structure to make that person want to beat those deadlines. An example of this can be an early completion bonus. Many contractors that finish public construction efforts, like a bridge, will receive a hefty payment bonus for doing so. Figure out what that incentive/bonus plan is, and get it implemented right away, the sooner, the better.

Hire someone new: Re-open that job description and get on the case of finding a replacement for the person you fired, immediately. When you do this, it creates a sense of urgency for the team. It helps the team feel like you understand that the resource is important and that you have their back. Also, the team won’t feel beaten down, like they have too much on their plate to get done. They know you are about to replace that person, so they are not overwhelmed. And, you can also incentivize the team to bring in someone they’ve worked with before or trust. If you do end up hiring that person, they can get some sort of cash bonus.

After all, keeping the team productive and their spirits high is the most important job of any executive. If you start failing at this and the team is starting to break down, you are in trouble and need to figure it out fast. If you slip and let it get out of hand, you have let your team down and not executing, and your team should hold you accountable for this.

How do you deal with “breaking up” or firing someone? What do you do to keep the team from being negative? How do you get them pumped up?

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After this post, some people are going to think I’m a jerk, and that’s fine. After all, not everyone is going to love you and you’re doing something wrong if you don’t offend a few people. But, for those that know me, know that I am not and that I’d go out of my way to take care of people. I live and breathe by the “take care of your people” mentality. Partially, and somewhat selfishly, because you know people will go to bat for you if you do. It is human nature. But, I’m a very execution focused individual and when people aren’t cutting their own weight, it’s time for them go.

Dealing with people that aren’t cutting their weight is a really tough situation. You naturally want to give people a try and a second (sometimes, third and fourth) chance, but, the question really is, will they ever work out if it’s not a fit right away. In my experience, it won’t work. If someone isn’t working out in the first few weeks or first couple tries, they’ll never work out. It’s time to move on and cut your losses, on both sides of the equation. The last thing you want to do is sit there and spend so much time and effort on people that are not only not cutting their own weight, but also, detracting from your ability to get things done. If I have to spend time micro-managing and hand holding someone through tasks, to-do’s, etc (and it’s not for learning purposes), I am being very inefficient with my time – that is not okay.

There are a variety of factors that go into this and nine times out of ten, it is not a personal thing. Many times it has to do with culture and other times it could just be the way people work. I have some very talented friends that get stuff done, but, it is on their own schedule and you just have to let them be. For some, that might work, for others it might not. But, if it’s not a fit for what your doing and you find that out quickly, for both your sakes, it’s time to move on. It will seriously help you both at the end of the day, rather than delaying the inevitable.

For those that just don’t cut their weight, bottom line, I could care less about any excuses that you may have. You might be an awesome person and you might be super fun, but again, this is business. I was actually almost hesitant about publishing this post because of what people might think. But, thanks to Ben Horowitz, I realized that it’s true – nobody cares – about your excuses, about your issues, or any of the multitude of reasons why you didn’t execute. When it comes down to it, a lack of execution anywhere in the organization is going to hurt everyones chances at making revenue, getting to profitability, and a possible exit/IPO.

Everyone in an organization should hold each other accountable for execution, including and especially it’s executives. Politics, talking about people behind their backs, and excuses don’t make people money. They aren’t the foundation of successful companies. And, they are definitely not the characteristics of companies that provide shareholder value or lead to exits/IPOs. Need more proof of this, look at Yahoo!’s stock price over the last few years. (Actually you don’t even need to look to know it hasn’t done anything.)

Execution is such an important part of startups and being an entrepreneur, more important than ideas in my opinion. (I’ll try to explain this in a later post). If there are things that are distracting from execution, including and especially people, cut it short before you hurt your businesses ability to become successful. Otherwise, you are failing your team, your investors, your shareholders – and most importantly, yourself.

I’d love to hear your thoughts: How have you delt with people who don’t execute? Do you believe in hire fast, fire fast? How do you ensure execution in your company?

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I have to admit, this last week has been one of the toughest for me both personally and professionally. Lots has happened that has left me either sad, frustrated, and/or throwing my hands up in disbelief. Whatever the case, I found myself last night with a lack of energy and motivation to push through. After a bit of this and some venting, I realized that was not characteristic of me. I don’t just sit around, I’m a fighter and usually go out and take what I need.

Fighting through adversity is a very tough challenge, the negativity can be a slippery slope that can kill anyones drive and hunger. Trust me, as someone who has been down that road before, it is not healthy. What we really need to realize as entrepreneurs is – shit is going to go wrong – bottom line. Deadlines will not be met, an investor will back out, and/or people will just flat out not deliver. Which ever the case, again, shit is going to go wrong, suck it up. (It’s what I just told myself!)

There are two things I feel are important when dealing with adversity, dealing with failure and being resilient:

1. Failure is a part of life: We all fail and it is important to understand failure in inevitable. What is more valuable is learning to manage the rate at which you fail and the impact it has. By understanding things will go wrong and you will make mistakes, you learn to plan ahead and be ready for it. But, this requires you can admit you will make mistakes and you’re not too stubborn to take advice from others that will allow you to plan ahead. A business model might not work, a traffic acquisition method might dry up, or you might just flat out need to start a new business.

Whatever the case, it’s important to analyze and even scrutinize ourselves and how we react during these failures. Are we getting frustrated? Are we getting upset? Do we allow ourselves time away to clear the mind? etc.

2. How resilient can you really be?: Mark Suster wrote a great post about resiliency in his series on entrepreneur dna and it was one of my favorite reads about the topic of entrepreneurship. The only disagreement I have with it is a matter of semantics. I believe resiliency is based on how many punches you can take, how many times you can get knocked down, and get back up to keep moving forward. (see a theme about moving forward yet?!). No matter how tough we are, when we get knocked down it takes a lot out of you as a person. How you face with the adversity of being knocked down is truly important. Can you take a beating from people telling you your monetization strategy sucks, investors being vague about not investing, people telling you flat out, your idea sucks, or someone yelling at you at an event because you’re taking their business away. (yes, all of these, including the last happened to me in the last 4 months.)

The most notable to me was when I went to multiple angel investors and VC firms and every single one scrutinized the fact I did not have a technical co-founder. I took meetings all across town and even in other cities. I can tell you straight up, it wasn’t easy. Listening to investor after investor tell me this, while developer after developer was looking for a full time gig or wanting to start their own project. There were many nights I went home and said “this is just never going to happen.” I remember telling one of my investors I had lost faith trying to find a technical co-founder, but I was going to give it one final week of searching. One week turned into two and about 100 emails sent and 4-5 meetings later, success was achieved.

John Wooden said it best:

“It’s not so important who starts the game but who finishes it.”

All that matters is when that final buzzer sounds or that final whistle blows, you are there standing, with your hands raised in the air, in victory. The building of a startup and successful exit or IPO is equivalent to the mental and physical toughness of winning championships in sports. The ability to understand your competition, the ability to deal with fatigue, the ability to deal with controversy, etc. All of it really makes or breaks your ability to fight for what is yours. Do you have what it takes to go out there and take it. The most important question you have to ask yourself, day in, and day out is: Do you have the mental and physical perseverance to deal with all the adversity we face as entrepreneurs?

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There is always a lot going on in my head, from trying to understand business models,monetization, traffic acquisition and a hundred other things. As an entrepreneur and someone running a company, our brains are always working. Even when we take time off, there is no resting, simply put, we are always thinking about our business.

I learned this when I was nineteen or twenty and the owner of the company I worked at told me it was the reason he never took vacations. Who knew I would follow in his footsteps and not take one either for the next 10 years, until I learned they are needed and you need to clear the headspace.

But, even though latest fad is failure (i.e. fail fast, fail hard, etc.), I don’t want to fail like others at any part of the business, including “putting my thoughts down on paper”. You can take this literally (i.e. write it down on paper), or figuratively (i.e. put it into documents, powerpoint, or flowcharts). I got this feedback recently when we were reviewing a few things on eventify because I just kept rattling off thought after thought I hadn’t previously clearly communicated and/or passed on to the team. I knew what needed to be done, I knew what strategies to take, etc. But, as I move into this next phase for eventify, it is super important for the entire team to understand this, not just myself.

This last week, I’ve spent lots of time trying to think through how to put down everything was going on in my head about the business, in the best way possible. At first, it started as just thoughts I feverishly typed away into text files, over emails, etc. just so I could get them down. Then, I thought through it a bit and realized some of it would be best depicted in a flowchart of some sort and others just explained in bullets. But, to digest it all, I used the ever infamous Powerpoint to get the point (no pun intended) across in a story.

The reason this is so important is as our team continues to grow and make progress, it’s important for everyone to understand our plans, see what we are doing to achieve them, and contribute to process. The more we poke at, dissect, and optimize the model, I feel, the better we’ll get and closer we will be to successfully building a business. As we move forward, I’ll start printing out these thoughts, flowcharts, etc. and post them up in our office so we see them daily, they will top of mind, and we can spend every day pushing against these goals, models, etc.

Another big reason that I am now starting to find it really important is that there is a limit to how much our brain can hold. There is a limit to how much you can actually retain and keep up in your brain before you start forgetting things. The more I put things down in emails and just straight up text files, the more clear by mind is to focus on new challenges or really dig deeper and dissect the current ideas/models that I’ve already put together.

How many of you do this? Do you put your thoughts down in some sort of consumable format? Are you going to start to now?

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This is stemming from a quote in a post about Mark Cuban that I read thanks to Michael Gray and Don Dodge. They both shared the post within moments of each other and I figured I had to read it. I really enjoyed the story and references to moves he made in his career. There were some huge risks, but, he trusted himself to make the right move. This quote stuck out to me and is the basis for this post:

“If you play by the rules, you’re screwed. Successful people think for themselves” – Mark Cuban

In my life, I’ve heard many people tell me how things shouldn’t be done. From the day I started college, my parents told me that I am making all the wrong decisions about school, and then work followed, then moving to SF, etc. I’ve had teachers tell me that I’m not going to do anything with my life, co-workers tell me that I should do things a certain way, and industry friends tell me that I’m not making the right move in a given situation. Yet, at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve made all the right moves to lead me to where I am today, and that’s all the matters. Who knows what will happen long term, but right now, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else but running Eventify and overseeing Visible Factors.

But all of that reminded me of why I realize that I have to be who I am going to be at the end of the day. People are going to doubt the decisions you make. You have to be strong enough to take the doubters and turn them into believers, that’s what it’s all about. There will be some stragglers and critics and you just have to brush them off.

People are going to tell you not to take a certain opportunity or not to build a company because they think it’s a stupid idea or move. That is ammunition for making something a reality and turning something into a great decision. Many people told me that eventify wasn’t a smart move, that I shouldn’t do it. I’m told constantly that I know nothing about the events industry, but, in the last 4 months I’ve come to learn more about events and the venues in them than any other startup or site that has had a head start. (or so I believe!) I’ve learned pricing models, what venues people are looking for, how to acquire venues for the site, and much much more. I’ve learned it all because I’ve taken the people that have told me I shouldn’t do it and turned it into the energy I need to make it happen. People told me not to share my idea, but, doing so has helped me gain the knowledge that I have to understand the industry…now it’s execution mode.

I’m told constantly I shouldn’t be running eventify and overseeing Visible Factors. That running two companies is a mistake and it might be, but, I’m still going to do it because at my core I believe they each help me knowledge. Sure, I don’t let one become a distraction of the other and my main goal is to build Eventify to be a huge business. But, they each help me learn and be creative with each business. It’s amazing how bootstrapping Visible Factors and raising money for Eventify has taught me so much of ways to help each business out and become successful. I learn from each one daily and they help me grow both companies concurrently…in my mind, that’s a win-win.

I question my decisions all the time and wonder if I am making the right moves. It is natural to do so, but, I will always make a decision quickly and not think too much about the doubters. After all, you are making the decision, it is your company, it is your opportunity. Whatever the case may be, you hold the keys to your own destiny, it’s up to you which door to unlock.

Don’t listen to people, listen to yourself. That’s all I have to say at the end of the day. You’re the most important person to you. If you are doubting yourself, you are doubting any sort of success that you have set for yourself. Make your decisions and run with it. You can always fix something if it’s broken…but…you can’t do anything if you don’t even start.

Distractions are all over the place

As if you don’t check Facebook, Twitter, and the many other non-productive things that we all do on a daily basis. Isn’t that a distraction? Or, how about the occasional, “I’m just going to see what’s interesting on TV…”, right, then 2 hours later you just watched “40 year old virgin” for the 18th time, or some random variation of that.

Of course there are tons of distractions from really interesting conversations to the crazy random people. There are times where I want to pull my hair out because of the fact sdthat there is some crazy dude yelling into his cell phone, or, the group of older ladies who get together for coffee once a year and are louder than hyenas. (sorry ladies, you are!)

Again though, distractions are all over the place, even in an office environment. Coffee shops tend to have the least in my opinion. And, when it does get too distracting, music drowns everything out.

Sparking creativity

Overall, I tend to find it a very creative environment. Especially when there are other people around you doing similar things. Whenever I see groups working on websites, or writers working on a script (sure, maybe only in LA), to someone just sitting there reading a book. I tend to feed off that energy and it definitely sparks the creative juices inside me.

Talking to others really ends up getting creativity going for me. Hearing what people are working on and doing. People trying to make it in their respective industries. It really brings out the entrepreneur in me and gets me excited about even the most mundane excel spreadsheets or data entry.

A change of scenery and environment

I have self diagnosed myself with ADHD and sometimes just changing environments is all I need to calm me down. That and usually a nice cup of chamomile tea will do the trick. While I’m at a coffee shop, all of the noise, people, bustling, and music tends to calm me down a bit as well. It keeps part of my mind going rather than wondering and not staying focused, as odd as that sounds. I’ve learned this about myself and have learned to find ways to make myself more productive.

You never know who you’ll meet

I tend to always meet people while I’m at a coffee shop, I’ve met people that I’ve partnered with, industry contacts, and most recently, someone helping out with Eventify. Nina Kaufmann, one of our awesome writers I actually met at Paper or Plastik Cafe while working on the product.

Secondly, while at Paper or Plastik, I met the owner and talked to him about listing their venue on eventify. They were excited about the idea of getting more eyeballs to their studio, Mimoda Jazzo. In our next iteration of eventify, you will see the studio as a featured venue, all because of working at the coffee shop.

Coffee shops aren’t for everyone, but they are for me

I know that not everyone is productive or likes to work at a coffee shop. Find places that can help your productivity and break up your day from being mundane and boring. I think all that matters is that when you get into a rut, you find a way to re-energize yourself, even if it means talking a walk, going out for lunch, etc. For me, coffee shops work, and they might for you too!

If you like working at coffee shops, tell me your experiences and whether it has helped you be more productive? You’ve met anyone interesting? Or, if you just plain hate it! If you haven’t, give it a shot and let me know how you like it!

Sharing what I learn daily is really important to me, because I want to pay forward what others like Greg Boser and Rand Fishkin did for me when I was breaking into the career. It’s the reason I share the knowledge and experiences at conferences or events. I’ll never say I’m an expert and you’ll never hear me say I’m one of the best, because I know I’m not, just a guy that’s sharing what he’s learned in his career. The reason I started this blog was to share my experiences as an entrepreneur and sometimes the challenges I may face.

I realize I’m a hypocrite

Yes, you might call me hypocritical for writing this after talking about not letting people pick my brain. That statement still holds true for people that don’t appreciate it. Sure, it happens, it’s the nature of life and business, I won’t let it get me down. Life is too short for that and there are so many amazing people that do deserve it. I just brush the people that are all about using others off and move on to bigger, better, and happier things.

Sharing is truly caring

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve spent countless hours of my time educating others, fielding questions and making intros for people that are current colleagues, former colleagues, or acquaintances in the industry. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent an hour or more with people going through the basics of SEO and constantly field emails or IMs from people with questions they may have. In my opinion, it’s important for us to do this and share our knowledge.  I really do enjoy teaching others and watching people have “ah ha” type moments because of what they learn. At the end of the day though, there is no greater feeling than having helped someone learn something new.

As I get older and more successful (and hopefully wiser!) I will try to dedicate more time to this and less to things that are a waste of time.. Until then, I’d love to keep doing this when I have time and do more trainings, some for free and some paid.

Education is an important part of life.

My friend Erik Deutsch teaches an extension course at UCLA for Communication professionals and he has asked me to guest lecture the class twice. Both times it was an amazing opportunity to share my knowledge with a room full of both young and hungry students to older professionals learning new skills. I’d love to continue sharing my knowledge in these capacities, especially with younger students looking to break into Online Marketing.

Being a mentor and dedicating time to it

Over the next few months and into 2012, I have made it a personal goal for myself to teach others and be a mentor. Yes, I’ve got a lot of my plate with eventify and overseeing my SEO consulting company, at a high level. But, I want to make room for mentoring because it is important to pay forward what others have done for me. Would be great to find one or two students looking to break into the online marketing world and teach them all the things that I’ve learned from my friends and colleagues. I’d even love to give them a chance to work on projects for Visible Factors and eventify, and provide them real life experience.

Providing an opportunity for someone to grow and succeed is important to me and I hope it is for others. If you are a student or you are looking to learn and experience new opportunities in your career, definitely feel free to reach out to me by emailing me or follow me and mention me on twitter and I’ll follow you back!